Cantara Christopher's Open Salon Blog

What They Knew of That Day: Kennedy and Survivor's Guilt

Thu, 20 Dec 2012 19:12:14 -0500

Survivor's Guilt: The Secret Service and the Failure to Protect the President by Vince Palamara is not a book to be read for pleasure. It is not a sterling contribution to literature. Short, but packed with names, dates, citations and, significantly, stripped of narrative, it is probably the best compendium of basic facts having to do with the United States Secret Service (or USSS) circa 1963—specifically, one particular day towards Thanksgiving.

First off I must disclose that I am not a JFK Assassination Conspiracy nut. I vividly remember the day Kennedy died and I have my own theories about what happened (which I'll explore at a more appropriate time). But I'm no expert. Conspiracy theorists who get into the game usually choose one exclusive aspect or another to cover, and Palamara has chosen the Secret Service detail assigned to protect President Kennedy in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963. Palamara is not so much a journalist as a competent thesis writer and is enough of a thorough researcher and impartial interviewer to back up his ideas.

And there is no disputing what happened that day: Simply, the Secret Service detail assigned to the President failed to protect him from a fatal bullet. Quite evidently there was sloppiness in their protocol and security checks. There was some faulty decision-making. But to a man the agents of the Kennedy detail also displayed a high degree of professionalism up to the moment of the assassination. And no conspiracy within the Service, no malice acted upon, no criminality in the performance of duty, has ever been proved.

It's what the Service did immediately afterwards that's remained a problem for nearly fifty years. Blatantly confiscating evidence, falsifying documents, illegally taking people into custody—these were some of the acts allegedly committed by agents almost as soon as the alleged assassin was arrested by Dallas police. Rumors persist to this day that they did far worse things to preserve the image of the Service—or as some people would term it, cover their asses. A House Committee in 1979 found a hornet's nest of misdeeds and I'm sure many more remain uncovered. And all of it has only helped to foster an atmophere of suspicion and mistrust in our government and our institutions that, as I say, has remained a problem since the early sixties.

The thing is, this arrogant manipulation of facts by this agency of our government was completely unnecessary. As far as the American public was concerned, the human factors that might have contributed to the success of the assassination were plausible and entirely forgiveable, had they known them. The driver of the limousine, Agent Bill Greer, on hearing the first shot, panicked and hit the brake rather than the accelerator. Agent Clint Hill, following behind on foot, simply couldn't climb on the limousine fast enough. Had they acted any differently the President may still well have died on the surgeon's table.

It's old news, but it's still a hurtful subject to some, not least of all to the most important agent still living, Clint Hill, the focus of a recent account entitled The Kennedy Detail. I mention this 2010 book because, if chronology can be correctly interpreted, The Kennedy Detail was written by Hill's former superior in the USSS, Gerald Blaine, as a direct response to Survivor's Guilt, which was published in 2006 and for which Palamara interviewed, among others, Blaine and Hill themselves. Palamara's book must certainly have opened old wounds.

But here's the marked difference. Blaine's book was positioned from the very beginning to be accepted by the general reading audience in a big way—to be a bestseller, in other words. A young up-and-coming journalist was hired as co-writer to help shape his story into a soft sympathetic narrative about Real People. Personal anecdotes were added as were photographs and intimate details. The “official” story of the assassination (three bullets, one shooter) was adhered to. Kennedy is wrongly portrayed as an outgoing public leader with a cavalier attitude to being protected. The blighted lives of the agents in the aftermath of the shooting are brought to the forefront. The Kennedy Assassination as human drama, in other words. It's all been said before in fact and fiction, even the blighted lives of the agents part. Remember that great Clint Eastwoood movie, In the Line of Fire?

But The Kennedy Detail is a big comfortable book from a big comfortable publisher, Simon & Schuster (who by the way I used to work for, in Marketing). It's made the Times bestseller list, and I just read in the Hollywood trades that it's going to become a sort of dramatized documentary on the Discovery Channel, their second one on this subject.

“This is the project of a lifetime and I could not be more excited to be part of it,” the director and book adapter hired for the project, Stephen Gyllenhaal—a man of my acquaintance who is no stranger to image preserving—was quoted as saying. “Everyone knows how this story ends, but the true stories told through the eyes of this extraordinary band of brothers, from JFK's election to that awful day in Dallas, have never been told. It is time to share their perspective with the world.”

Well. I can understand buttering your bread, but it's this “band of brothers” malarky that gets me. There was no Henry V and there was no Agincourt, just a group of specifically trained government employees who failed their specific mission.

Survivor's Guilt, a self-published book, sold well to a niche audience and garnered some excellent endorsements from the very people in key positions to know the facts of that day and some who were there. It will be available from Trine Day this fall. Read it, use it as a springboard for your own private investigation, and to remove the bad taste of The Kennedy Detail's whitewash. I'll discuss that particular book at length in my next posting.

This is a reposting of a review I wrote for Open Salon on 15 October 2012 and deleted in error.

Notes from a Long Weekend: Beyond Dealey Plaza

Fri, 30 Nov 2012 21:11:20 -0500

First of four parts: Beyond Dealey Plaza; “Lee Like Moon”; The Burning of the Eureka; Dreaming of Kennedy

I spent the past month poring over a mountain of library books, some having to do with Watergate, some to do with the killing of Bobby Kennedy, but most concerning the strange doings surrounding the assassination of the President in Dallas. Now I can confidently report that I have a grasp of what actually happened in Dealey Plaza on that miserable weekend in November 1963.

The thing is, at this late date it's all virtually unproveable. In researching the JFK assassination, the best anyone can hope to achieve is a separate peace with the truth, and I believe I've achieved that. So I won't be publishing a thick tome anytime in the future, although I might write out my theory at length during the next year and print out a little pamphlet to pass around at the fiftieth anniversary observance.

As guides to the opening of my higher political (read: “conspiracy”) consciousness, I am particularly grateful for the thoughtful, well-written books of Thomas Buchanan (1965), Mark Lane (1966), Anthony Summers (1980), and James W. Douglass, a follower of the modern Christian mystic Thomas Merton (2008). I am also grateful for the comprehensive and often contradictory chronology of the events of November 22 compiled from official records by theater director David Ira Wood III, and for the minute investigative research into the Secret Service by Vincent Palamara. As well, I am grateful for relevant comments by author Bonar Menninger; former KGB officer Oleg Nechiporenko; former CIA agent Jane Roman; former Secret Service agent Abraham Bolden; Deputy Chief Counsel to the House Select Committee on Assassinations Gary Cornwell; and former UK diplomat Robert Holmes. For other reasons, I'm grateful for the writings of Davd Talbot (Salon's founder) and Peter Dale Scott, which introduced me to the concepts of “hidden history” and “deep history”—concepts I mentally played with a bit before rejecting them both as being falsely cohesive.

Having brought up the Secret Service, I should remind you that I was initially inspired by the memoir The Kennedy Detail (2010) by ex-agent Gerald Blaine with the help of self-styled journalist Lisa McCubbin. As I wrote in an earlier post, it's an execrably written book, utterly useless as history or reportage, filled as it is with misleads, deliberate obfuscations, nasty old grudges, and just a wee hint of racism. But my sometime friend Stephen Gyllenhaal was hired to write the screen adaptation, and I was curious to read his source material in order to find out what kind of narrative obstacles might lie in his path.

Instead, by failing to answer or even address the simplest questions about the assassination, The Kennedy Detail became my door to the seemingly infinite world of conspiracy research. Here's a brief outline of the various spheres JFK conspiracy research dips into, in no particular order:

Locations of intrigue: Dallas; Miami; Tampa; Chicago; Havana; New Orleans; Mexico City.

Entities of intrigue: The CIA; the FBI; the KGB; the Mafia; the US Secret Service; the Dallas Police; the Ku Klux Klan; the Mossad; the French Connection; Asian Heroin Interests; Big Oil Interests; Cuban Intelligence; French Intelligence; the Illuminati.

As on a Chinese menu, choose one or more items from column A and one or more from column B and you've got a theory. Noted academics like Professor James Fetzer like to take the whole lot and create a banquet I like to call the Unified Theory of Conspiracy, or as The Onion satirically announced in one of their headlines, They All Did It.

I'm not a conpiracy theorist. But I'm not of the lone gunman persuasion either. The theory I've arrived at of what truly happened at Dealey Plaza is a combination of chance, unforeseeable coincidence, deliberate omission, improvisation, minor errors, major criminality, and forgiveable human failings. It's the kind of theory a novelist might formulate. It begins, naturally, with the heart and mind of the main character, Lee Harvey Oswald.

The Kennedy Detail—Soon to be a Minor Motion Picture

Sun, 14 Oct 2012 23:10:56 -0400

When I read in the trades that my sometime friend Steve had gotten the gig to write the screenplay and direct the dramatic film version of The Kennedy Detail, ex-Secret Service agent Gerald Blaine's personal and supposedly factual account of the president's assassination in Dallas published in 2010, I promptly went out and got the book with the idea of reviewing it for its literary merits. I needn't have bothered. Blaine's book—which was written with the assistance of a junior journalist named Lisa McCubbin—is oh so terrible, filled with deception, emotional manipulation, and bad, bad writing.

What, for example, are we to make of this clause on the very first page: “...subconsciously his elbow pressed loosely on the handle of the snubnose .38-caliber revolver strapped to his hip.” An elbow with a subconscious! Or this clause in the chapter that recounts the shooting of the president: “...Paul Landis sucked in his breath as the horrific image became forever etched in his soul.” Or in the same chapter: “The triangular canyon of buildings created an echo chamber that masqueraded the sound...” and “Just as Clint's system rejected the sound of the second shot...” Masqueraded? Rejected? Where were the vaunted editors of Simon & Schuster when this manuscript was submitted for publication?

To say that The Kennedy Detail is execrably written and shamefully underedited is not enough. One has to come to the conclusion that this book clearly was written not for a serious readership, but is merely another in the long line of more or less successful attempts to capitalize on the Kennedy name, now more than ever as the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination approaches. Of course there's no denying that most of the authors of this kind of book are desperately grabbing for the brass ring—a lucrative movie option. Well, lucky for Blaine, he got one.

All of the preceding of course inevitably asks the question, What kind of film could be made of such a substandard book? To answer that, one need look no further than the person who has been hired for the task of not only directing the film, but writing the adaptation as well. Frankly, I'm amazed that a man like Stephen, a self-styled “indie” filmmaker and equally self-styled political progressive, would have anything to do with a book that espouses such negative views not only of John F. Kennedy but his successor, Lyndon Baines Johnson, both of whom were progressive Democrats.

Also puzzling is the producers' decision to hire Stephen in the first place. The scathing reviews of his latest film, his first feature in fourteen years, Grassroots—based on the true story of a failed run for a Seattle city council seat in 2001 which he himself optioned, co-adapted, and directed—don't do much to inspire confidence in his ability to adapt and direct historical accounts for the screen, particularly when they deal with deeply emotional or controversial events in America's history. Not only did Seattle's own alternative weekly write that Grassroots contained “the worst movie conclusion in recent memory, a nightmare of pacing and performance...” but NPR, that bastion of liberal attitudes, chimed in with: “[Gyllenhaal's] interests aren't particularly cinematic... Grassroots is a movie where bad ideas, because they're the ones championed by the 'correct' side, are king.” On the other side of the Atlantic, reviewer Patrick Gamble called Grassroots “a film that fails so dramatically that its very presence at this year's London Film Festival is utterly perplexing. ...Featuring some hideous moral ideology and heavily manipulative techniques, Grassroots' use of the 9/11 terrorist attacks is deeply deplorable, using the emotional effects of this travesty in an incredibly manipulative manner... ...There's also a heavy handed stab at reverse racism within politics... ...the film lacks the intelligence and political clout to deal with such a sensitive subject with any sense of decency or aptitude.”

The words decency and aptitude stand out especially when you consider that the real theme of The Kennedy Detail is the emotional burden the agents of this eponymous group had to bear after they failed, spectacularly failed, in their sole duty to protect the President of the United States. Although Blaine was not present in the Dallas motorcade that was fired upon—he had been sent ahead that morning to nearby Austin to prepare for the president's next scheduled appearance—Clint Hill, the main focus of Blaine's book, was there, a scant few feet away from the Kennedy limousine. Hill is the agent you see in the Zapruder film climbing onto the president's car to aid Mrs. Kennedy after the first shots hit her husband, and the scenes in the book that relate his everlasting guilt and grief at not being “fast enough” to leap in front of the president and take the fatal bullet himself are extremely painful to read. How in thc name of God could a demonstratably hamfisted filmmaker like Stephen be able to portray with any kind of truth or delicacy these painful scenes on film?

Additionally, Blaine has other concerns which Steve will have to consider whether or not to address in his adaptation, as a good twenty percent of The Kennedy Detail consists of the nursing of decades-old grudges. These passages too are painful to read, though for different reasons. After the assassination, not one Secret Service agent was fired or publicly reprimanded—Clint Hill was even cited for bravery—but for years to come the media and academics were unceasing in their inquiries into “what really happened” and who might be to blame. The Warren Commission early on did not spare its reproof: “The procedures relied upon the Secret Service for detecting the presence of an assassin located in a building along a motorcade route were inadequate. The Secret Service...did not investigate, or cause to be checked, any building located along the motorcade route to be taken by the President.” Some years later historian Michael L. Kurtz wrote: “Trained to react instantaneously...the Secret Service agents assigned to protect President Kennedy simply neglected their duty. The reason for their neglect remains one of the most intriguing mysteries of the assassination.” Not to mention the most famous Kennedy historian of all, William Manchester, who famously set down his judgment in Death of a President: “They were supposed to be picked men, honed to a matchless edge. The protection of the Chief Executive...was the profession of Secret Service agents. They existed for no other reason. ...[They] were in a position to take swift evasive action, and for five terrible seconds, they were immobilized.” And then there was JFK, Oliver Stone's infamous but popular movie which implicated the Secret Service in a huge government conspiracy...

Yet rather than tangle with any of these heavyweights—several of whom are still alive and well—Blaine chose instead to focus his indignation on Washington investigative journalist Drew Pearson, who died in 1969. What had Pearson done to deserve Blaine's attention? A week after the president's death he wrote in his syndicated column, “Six Secret service men charged with protecting the President were in the [nearby] Fort Worth Press Club the early morning of Friday, November 22, some of them remaining until nearly 3 o'clock. This was earlier in the day President Kennedy was assassinated. They were drinking. One of them was reported to have been inebriated.” Blaine takes three pages to not only to refute this claim in the lamest terms, but attempts to belittle the memory of the legendary Pearson, calling him a “muckraking journalist so intent on making a name for himself(!) with a new angle to the biggest story of the century that he never bothered to check the claims that would haunt these already broken men for the rest of their lives.”

To accuse that era's most widely-read political newsman of being “intent on making a name for himself” simply by doing his job is barely tolerable to a reader seeking the truth of what really happened that day “beyond any measure of a doubt”, as Blaine himself put it. Later in the book, though, his spleen becomes disheartening and even sinister when he turns on fellow Secret Service agent Abraham Bolden for having made the same accusations: “...he had approached the Warren Commission to provide testimony about derelict behavior of Kennedy Detail agents—which included elaborate sex parties and on-duty drinking at Hyannis Port [the Kennedy home on Martha's Vineyard] that he had witnessed while serving a thirty-day temporary assignment on the White House Detail in the summer of 1961. The insinuation was that the Kennedy Detail agents may have been responsible for the president's death due to a laxness in their duties...” Chicago-based Bolden, who was arrested in May of 1964 on trumped-up charges of attempting to sell agency secrets on the very day he was to give his testimony to the Warren Commission, was convicted and spent six years in an Illinois prison. Evidence which came to light decades later exonerated Bolden. In his field investigation only days before the assassination, he had stumbled onto a Mafia operation that already was a concern of National Security; in order to thwart the Mafia's illegal activities this information had to be kept a secret from the press, the public, and Congress—and Bolden's testimony had to be discredited. This evidence was contained in declassified files that were released in the early 90s. Blaine, who admitted in his book that he became “obsessed” with all the available material concerning the president's assassination, could hardly have been unaware of the information contained in these files.

There is another troubling element to this story: Abraham Bolden is black. He was in fact the first black to be hired by the Secret Service, on the special recommendation of President Kennedy. Bolden not only accused the other agents of laxity in discipline, but of racism as well. It is an allegation which Blaine describes as “ludicrous”. And yet his dismissal of Bolden as an agent with an “attitude”, his reminder that Bolden is after all only a convicted felon, seems to be too summarily dismissive of a man who, after all, was a fellow agent.

One old man's denials and prejudices, another's self-pity, that's all The Kennedy Detail seems to boil down to. Any other interpretation of the material contained in this book would lend itself more to fantasy than to the factual, better suited perhaps to the realm of conspiracy theorists.

And as Steve recently declared to an interviewer who asked him if he intended to steer clear of controversial conspiracy theories in The Kennedy Detail, “Wait and see.” But I know Stephen well enough to be certain that in this project, as in all his other projects, he will steer way clear of controversy. It just doesn't pay.

Or in the words of Robert Parry, a reporter formerly of AP and Newsweek, now an independent journalist: “The people who succeeded and did well were those who didn't stand up, who didn't write the big stories, who looked the other way when history was happening in front of them, and went along either consciously or just by cowardice with the deception of the American people.”

Good luck with your new project, Steve. Let us know what you decide.

Qui Es Mas Macho, Barak Obama o Rafael Correa?

Sun, 30 Sep 2012 20:09:15 -0400

Now that I've caught your attention with my Saturday-Night-Live-sketch Spanish (really, it's “¿Quién es más viril?”) let me reminisce about the coup. It's amazing to think that exactly two years have already gone by since the failed police takeover in Ecuador. And what an interesting eleven hours that was, let me tell you. My husband Michael, who is blind, was the first to sense something that morning was not quite right when the skies above our Quito barrio were strangely slient. Usually commercial flights come and go at all hours. Around noon Raquel, our vecina from downstairs, came up to let us know what was happening.

“The police have tried to kidap the president and now they are holding him prisoner,” she announced. Raquel's English is pretty fair, plus there hadn't been a shakeup of the government in a few years and it seemed we were due, so I understood and believed her for the most part. Usually this is the kind of statement norteamericanos have a hard time processing. We turned on the television to get some news, and found that luckily the government had taken over the private stations and was broadcasting developments live nonstop. Hoping for information that was more pertinent to our status as foreigners in Ecuador I called the US Embassy, and a nice young man advised us to stay in our home but be prepared to evacuate on a moment's notice. So we sat tight for the next few hours keeping our portable black-and-white TV on, and when the sun went down I made dinner.

Events that were transpiring just a few miles away in the center of the city unfolded on our small screen like Costa-Gavras. The police, apparently in a protest over cuts in their wages and benefits, had physically attacked President Rafael Correa, who had gone to their barracks to negotiate with them. He and a few of his entourage were rushed—by whom remains unclear—to a nearby hospital, where they promptly barricaded themselves in his room lest the police succeed in taking and moving him to some undisclosed location. Kidnap him, in other words. Early that afternoon Correa went out on the balcony of his hospital room and angrily faced down the police. Then after sunset in a conclusion worthy of a Stallone movie, loyal army forces launched an impressively spectacular assault on the hospital and rescued him, to the cheers of the triumphant soldiers.

Running parallel to all these thrilling events, of course, was the usual closing down throughout the country by the military of police stations, ports, bridges, airports, highways, and schools. Any minute we expected tanks to be rolling down our main road, the autopista Ruminhaui. But actually the only thing we really worried about was Raquel's husband Benjamin. His daily bus ride home from his job teaching English at a Catholic college would put him smack in the middle of the crowd of extremely volatile pro-Correa demonstrators in front of the hospital. It wasn't so much the possibility of physical danger to Benjamin we were worried about, it was rather that the soldiers were checking the IDs of everyone in the vicinity. Benjamin and Raquel are Jewish refugees from Cuba and, like us, sans papiers.

But by the end of the day everything had been concluded satisfactorily. Benjamin came home late but safe. Reports said less than a dozen people were shot in the demonstration and the assault. Once he returned to the presidential palace Correa declared a state of emergency which fortunately lasted only a month. In fact by the following week everyone was calm as cows again, as if the coup attempt had never happened.

But I'm getting far afield. When my husband and I came back to the States I didn't carry away from that day either a lingering anxiousness or a burning desire to further investigate the still-undisclosed machinations of the coup attempt. Instead I've kept an image in my mind which anyone can find on YouTube. It's of Correa on the balcony, facing down the crowd of heavily-armed policemen below, where he rips off his tie, opens wide his shirt, bares his chest, and defiantly shouts, “¡Si quiere matarme, máteme!” If you want to kill me, kill me!

Watching that video I was never prouder of possessing like Correa a Latin temperment, which is where machismo comes from. To be truly macho is to possess a character trait which has no basis in rationality or measured response. It is, let us say, not Anglo. It is hot-headed, impetuous, bullheaded, dramatic. But it is a brave thing. A man with machismo looks his enemy in the eye and when he is sure he's in the right, there is no tank more implacable, no force more irresistible.

A man with machismo will not compromise, simper, weasel, or equivocate. A macho president would not sneak into the rule of law an executive order calling for the indefinite detention or punishment without trial of suspected enemies of the state.

I am a citizen of an Anglo country and realize that only an Anglo-minded president is still the best fit to be our leader. Still...

A-Begging We Will Go on Kickstarter—For America!

Thu, 20 Sep 2012 17:09:16 -0400

Creatures of Hollywood have no right to ask for money on Kickstarter.

Kickstarter is one of those online businesses, the best known of its kind,wherestruggling artists and cultural activists can go to publicize their projects in order to solicit donations. Crowdsourcing I think they call it. I can't say I endorse this approach to fundraising unreservedly. I think an activist would fare better working within her own geographical community where her project has more urgency; and that an artist ought to build up his audience via his own private network first before hitting up the general public for cold hard cash. Then there's that matter of the service fee in which you see a hefty cut—10-12%—of your proceeds go to the financial institutions that underwrite Kickstarter, which are probably the financial institutions that have kept you struggling in the first place.

But if you accept the premise that these online gimmicks exist to serve the culturally needy, you also have to agree that only the needy have a right to use them. Yes, I know. A rich man has a right to stand in a bread line as much as anyone, but why would he want to?

Which brings me back to two particular Creatures of Hollywood and their crowdsourcing project.

The partners in this particularly cockamamie enterprise are none other than actor Jason Biggs, star of the American Pie comedies from a few years ago, and his sidekick, commercial director Stephen Gyllenhaal, whose biggest claim to fame is that he is the father of movie stars Jake and Maggie Gyllenhaal. Their project? A short, humorous, but presumably instructive film on how a young person should audition, ahem, run for public office.

“I star in a movie coming out this summer called Grassroots,” writes Biggs on the homepage of his project, which is modestly entitled Jason Biggs Saves American Democracy, “and thanks to what I Iearned while playing this role, I have become totally passionate about grassroots politics on the local level. Therefore, I've decided to dedicate my abilities to helping every single grassroots candidate in America, so that we can turn America around and get it going in the right direction again!! That's why I'm launching this Kickstarter campaign to raise money for a How-to-Get-Elected-Grassroots-Style video starring me, to be directed by the director of Grassroots, Stephen Gyllenhaal.”

This is some of the “cool stuff” (Jason's words) you get for your donation: For $3 you get a “shout-out” from director Stephen Gyllenhaal on Twitter; for $15 you can submit your headshot to Stephen Gyllenhaal to be kept “on file”; for $150 you get to submit your script to Stephen Gyllenhaal's “team” for “professional coverage”; for $250 you get notes on your YouTube video from Stephen Gyllenhaal; for $350 you get coverage on your script from the big guy himself, Stephen Gyllenhaal; for $1000 you get “a chance to work with Jason Biggs”; for $1500 you get to play a round of miniature golf with Stephen Gyllenhaal; for $2000 you get an acting lesson from Stephen Gyllenhaal; and for a neat $10,000 Stephen Gyllenhaal will hold a read-through of your script with you via Skype. Oh, and there are the usual posters, mugs, and blooper reels thrown in as well.

As Jack Paar would say, I kid you not. But it makes me wonder how much these two bozos are kidding the American public and why in the name of God they would want to do so. Jason Biggs is still a bankable name, Stephen Gyllenhaal not so much, but either of them could raise the very modest $5000 they set as their fundraising goal with a swipe of their American Express cards. So why didn't they?

The answer lies in the very sobriquet given them: they are Creatures of Hollywood.

Hollywood loves cool, and Kickstarter is cool. Kickstarter will get your image out there, position you as a struggling artist no matter how much is in your bank account, publicize your name in association with a lofty-sounding project. What aging creature of Hollywood whose star is dimming wouldn't leap at that, especially for no effort and free of charge? Ah, but you say, it isn't free of charge. What about that hefty service fee on Kickstarter? Well, they charge that only if you meet your fundraising goal; if you don't meet it, your potential donors needn't honor their pledges and you don't complete your project, which means Kickstarter doesn't take their fee from you. How's that for prime publicity for no work and no money?

As it was, the boys did fail to meet their fundraising goal. They got close, though! No, I lie. In the two months of their campaign they raised $497 in pledges from 23 potential donors, along with one who was potentially willing to cough up $1000 for that chance to work with Jason Biggs. Number of pledges for Stephen Gyllenhaal to read your script? Watch your YouTube video? Give you an acting lesson? Play miniature golf with you? Send you a Twitter shout-out? Zero, zero, zero, zero, and...zero.

Damn. And I really did want to watch Jason Biggs humorously fill out the forms to run for office. I wonder if he could have come up with the forty-buck filing fee.